Intersubjective Reality Changes Slowly Because Hierarchies Own It

Harari draws a useful distinction between three kinds of reality. There is objective reality: the rock, the river, gravity, things that exist whether or not anyone believes in them. There is subjective reality: my pain, your taste in music, things that exist because one mind experiences them. And there is a third kind, which he calls intersubjective: things that exist because many people believe in them together, and that would vanish if they all stopped.

Money is intersubjective. So are nations, corporations, laws, human rights, and the idea that a particular piece of paper makes you the owner of a particular house. None of these is out there in the rock. All of them are enormously powerful, and they are powerful precisely because everyone acts as if they were real.

Most of what we argue about in politics is intersubjective. What the economy is for, how a society should be run, who owes what to whom, what counts as fair. These are not facts to be discovered. They are agreements, and agreements can be changed.

The Question Nobody Asks

If intersubjective reality is just shared belief, why is it so hard to change?

Beliefs change fast. Fashions turn over in a season. Technologies replace each other in a decade. A population can learn a new device, a new word, a new habit in a year. Yet the intersubjective structures that govern our lives, the economic arrangements, the form of government, the distribution of rights, move at a glacial pace, and when they do move it takes a crisis or a war.

This is odd. If a thing exists only because we believe in it, changing our minds should be enough to change it. Something is holding it in place that is not the belief itself.

What Holds It in Place

Here is my answer. Intersubjective reality is not held by everyone equally. It is held, maintained, and defended by hierarchies whose position depends on it.

Take the belief that the economy must be organised the way it currently is. That belief is not distributed evenly. It is produced, reproduced, and broadcast by governments whose legitimacy rests on it, by a press whose owners and advertisers profit from it, and by corporations whose entire existence is an artefact of it. These are hierarchies. They have budgets, staff, and a continuous interest in the belief remaining exactly as it is.

An ordinary person who stops believing that the current arrangement is the only possible one changes nothing, because the arrangement is not held in his head. It is held in institutions, and institutions do not change their minds. They change their staff, occasionally, and the new staff inherit the belief with the job.

Intersubjective reality is slow to change because the people who could change it are not the people who hold it. The public could form a new agreement tomorrow. The hierarchies that embody the old agreement have no mechanism for noticing, and every incentive not to.

Why a Crisis Is Currently Required

This explains something about history that otherwise looks like bad luck.

Large changes in how a society sees itself almost always arrive through catastrophe. A depression, a lost war, a revolution. It looks as if humans can only learn through pain. I do not think that is right. I think the catastrophe is what it takes to break the hierarchies that were holding the old agreement in place, and once they are broken the new agreement, which was often ready for decades, drops into position.

The pain was never the teacher. It was the demolition crew. The public had frequently changed its mind long before, and had simply been unable to make the change count.

Direct Democracy as a Faster Channel

If this diagnosis is right, the remedy follows directly.

You want a mechanism by which a change in shared belief becomes a change in shared arrangement without passing through the hierarchies that have an interest in stopping it. That is what deciding things directly is. When the public can put a question on the table and settle it, an agreement that has shifted in a million private conversations can become a decision in one public one. The press can editorialise against it, the government can dislike it, the corporations can lobby, and none of that is decisive, because none of them holds the vote.

I do not claim this makes change fast in absolute terms, or that fast change is always good. The conservative argument that intersubjective structures should move slowly because they are load-bearing has force, and the previous post on this blog about law without tradition tries to give it its due. What I claim is narrower: the current speed is not set by the public's caution. It is set by the interests of the institutions that embody the old agreement, and those are two very different brakes. One of them is legitimate. The other is a minority holding the majority's reality hostage, and calling it stability.